Welcome back to The Out Door, Pitchfork's monthly guide to all sounds on the fringe. In this installment, we explore the jazz amalgamations of Chicago's Joshua Abrams, consider an excellent electric fusion LP on a heavy metal label, and speak with Thought Broadcast about the shortcomings of noise. But first, a reexamination of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's reputation as a gateway into experimental music.

I: Godspeed at the Gateway?

Early last week, I was having trouble sleeping, so I struggled out of bed and fumbled around until I found my cell phone. I checked the requisite social media services and, out of habit, thumbed my way toward my work email. Four hours earlier, just before midnight, Graham Latham, the publicist at Montreal's Constellation Records, had sent me a message that opened: "GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR – NEW ALBUM ... The LP should land in your mailbox tomorrow."

My hypnopompic mind was confused: Earlier that day, I'd read that Godspeed, who were set to arrive in my home state of North Carolina for a concert just three days later, had no plans to write or record new material. Surely, they wouldn't-- couldn't?-- be releasing fresh music in only two weeks. I climbed back in bed.

A few hours later, of course, I realized I hadn't manufactured the news at all: Next week, Godspeed You! Black Emperor-- the politically powered punk chamber ensemble from Canada-- will release ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!, their first new album since 2002. The local show had long been sold-out, so the new album announcement didn't drive ticket sales. It did, however, help galvanize the notion that Godspeed's implicit messages, long associated with millennial unrest and post-9/11 turmoil, remained relevant. In short, Godspeed would return again during a time of political instability and during an election cycle, attempting to pull their rebellion from its tenure in resin. As such, long before the first note sounded, the Cat's Cradle-- an 800-capacity venue in a strip mall in a college town in North Carolina-- was shoulder-to-shoulder, for an instrumental band from Montreal on a weeknight. I wasn't dreaming.

During the decade since Godspeed's last record, I've often heard the band mentioned as a gateway, both into experimental music and, to a lesser extent, radical politics. They're often considered a post-rock band due not only to their core of guitar, bass, and drums, but also to the requisite codas they almost always reach. Godspeed did more than build through arpeggios into one searing climax after another, though. Their use of field recordings as a canvas was more specific and expansive than that of their peers; where the oft-pedantic Explosions in the Sky used war-movie clips to get fists raised in triumph, Godspeed seemed to use such samples as prompts, webbing their unwavering tones through them. To my ears, that move made them part of a lineage of composers working at the multiple intersections of electronic and acoustic music, where orchestras work against digital elements or folks with circuitry transmogrify the sounds of traditional instruments into new, liminal sounds. Here was some version of "electroacoustic" music, skewing toward the mainstream.

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But mostly, Godspeed You! Black Emperor droned, sustaining a note or theme for minutes until they lurched slowly toward the apogee. The ascent of "Their Helicopters' Sing", from the new record, summons the harsh luminosity of Tony Conrad's Four Violins (1964), the lurking throb of early Sunn O))), and the simple menace of the Dead C. In fact, two of the album's four tracks are drones that forego Godspeed's usual end-times bombast; closer "Strung Like Lights at Thee Printemps Erable" drifts through a web of static and distortion, not unlike the music of Philip Jeck. The tones thicken and stretch, but they never fundamentally change. These aren't just preambles; they're pieces all their own.

Droning, of course, is not a revolutionary act. It's an irrefutably traditional idea ingrained in folk idioms across the world and in the same liturgical music that eventually funneled toward Western rock 'n' roll. But holding a note at length within the indie rock context in which Godspeed still holds sway remains relatively uncommon, no matter how many records Jim O'Rourke released on Drag City, or how long live versions of "Sister Ray" got, or how many Radiohead fans learned about Paul Lansky and his peers through a sample in "Idioteque". In fact, an article published by The Atlantic this summer, entitled "The History of Drone Music Culminates in Now That's What I Call Drone", treated the idea of drone like some modern novelty, a curio that could be tagged with historical prominence but that never substantively connected to most music in 2012. Reckoned writer Robinson Meyer, "July 2012 is the month for drone music." He based the claim on two new records.

To me, a foundation of drones has long been the revelation and reward of Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Their surprising popularity introduced new listeners to the idea of tones as sprawls, even if it was simply the halcyon before the subsequent melodrama. Indeed, at the Cat's Cradle last week, they started with an enormous drone. The collective's members walked out two at a time to expand the sound, each sustaining a simple, steady hum. I loved it: For the first 15 minutes, I bobbed my head as if I were at a metal gig, responding to the pockets of frequency variation coming from the strings and guitars like a big beat. Overtones cascaded through the building, rattling the walls and rails of the club.

When I looked around, however, I realized I felt as if I were on something of a solo mission. The bulk of the audience treated the drone like a passive introduction-- not music itself so much as a convenient trick to introduce the members, who would subsequently make proper music. As each player walked on, the crowd cheered, honoring the personality, not the sound. Elsewhere throughout the evening, fists were raised and heads were banged; at the start, though, phones were inspected, and small talk was big. Despite legend, the drone became the gateway to Godspeed, rather than Godspeed acting as the gateway to drone.

Listening again to the new album, that idea holds: Taken together, both of those steady pieces are by far shorter than either of the album's 20-minute marches-- you know, those totemic Godspeed spells that start quietly and end with the clang of militaristic furor. By comparison's sake, those sections of ALLELUJAH! feels like interludes, or gutters for the emotional runoff of the more monstrous pieces. They become entirely functional, mechanisms meant not to stand on their own but instead provide mid- and end-album respite. They are perfunctory holding cells for something that matters more.

Last month, Willamette Week published an ingenious piece by writer Robert Ham, who interviewed a 15-year-old family friend about the influence of Animal Collective on his teenage noise duo and his exploration of art at large. "Most music makes you feel nice and comfortable. But Animal Collective just didn't do that, and I thought that was an interesting feeling," explains Boston Slevin in a conversation that includes references to Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, and Moog Music bass pedals. Godspeed and Animal Collective are both very odd acts whose rise into-- and sustainability within-- a popular context has always seemed unlikely. The former turns cold instrumental stares into collective moments of triumph, while the latter wrestles noisy abstraction into pop transcendence.

But during the last decade, Animal Collective's albums have used that idea to go a few dozen different places, from almost-acoustic jangle to kaleidoscopic sprees. They're the kind of band that could send a young listener into a hundred different directions, all equally strange and revelatory. Godspeed, though, has always embraced linear movement toward a safe exit, creating a singular slipstream toward imminent release. For me, at least, they are their own gateway, supplying their own means to their own consistent end.

After I saw them last week, I wasn't inspired to revisit Varèse or the Theatre of Eternal Music, Stravinsky or Luc Ferrari. Mostly, I was inspired to write this and, finally, get back to bed. --Grayson Currin